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This is my first book. I wrote it on small slips of paper while I was a copy editor at Newsweek (a really bad copy editor: I can’t spell). It is a comic novel about a spoiled suburban teenager who is struck down with a mysterious disease, cannot walk, is in the hospital in excruciating pain for a year!

She observes her family clustered around her behaving absurdly (My favorite character is her mother, Brenda); she observes her doctors standing at her bedside and either hates them or seduces them. Through it all, Alice still manages to be a spoiled suburban teenager–to be, in other words, herself.

Reviews

NEWSWEEK, June 13, 1983
Bedpan Humor
by Ray Anello

It’s not easy to make light of misery. But that’s what Cathleen Schine does in this buoyant first novel about a young woman who suddenly, and inexplicably, loses the use of her legs. Alice Brody, 19, finds herself in a New York hospital where no one can explain why her legs…